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BEFORE he died, Mr Macara had
the satisfaction of
getting missionary ministers placed in Rannoch and
Glenlyon. This was a long step in advance of the
catechist help of schoolmasters on which he had to
rely before, but a quarter-of-a-century had still to
elapse before Rannoch and Glenlyon were created
into quoad sacra parishes. In 1804, Mr John Macnaughton, a native of the Glen, was the missionary
minister at Innerwick, and Mr Alexander Irvine
held a similar position at Kinloch Rannoch. The
latter, as Dr Irvine of Little Dunkeld, was, when he
died in 1824 at the premature age of fifty-two,
prominent among the leaders of the Church of
Scotland. Because he set his face as hard as steel
against the narrow views and intolerance into which
the revivalists plunged headlong, he has been classified among the Moderate leaders of the Church of
Scotland; but in his preaching he was as fervently
evangelical as any of the men who went out at the
Disruption. His memory is still green in Little
Dunkeld and Strathbrand as an eloquent preacher in
English and Gaelic, and an indefatigable parochial
worker. He was born at Garth, where his father
was a farmer; licensed by the Presbytery of Mull as
missionary at Kintra in July, 1797; removed to Rannoch in 1799; and, on Mr Macara's death, was
presented to Fortingall by Sir Robert Menzies, whence
he was transferred in fifteen months to Little
Dunkeld. His marriage with Jessie, the younger
daughter of Robert Stewart, Laird of Garth, and
sister of General David Stewart, the historian of the
Highland Regiments, was a romantic outcome of
early boy and girl love. Caste feeling refused
sanction to the marriage. The son of a small
tenant, however superior in natural talents and
scholarship, was not thought a fit mate for the
bonnie daughter of the laird. So, as the straight-
forward application for her hand was refused, the
lovers made an elopement marriage, and the laird
and his family soon became proud of their son and
brother-in-law. The graceful, lively style of General
Stewart's History owes much to Dr Irvine's revision
and assistance. He was a ready debater, with
flights of fancy and touches of humour to set off"
solid arguments, an impressive preacher, and a
whole-hearted Highlander who did much for Gaelic
literature and the gathering of the Ossianic poetry
which had come down orally from generation to
generation.
Mr Irvine was succeeded,
first in Rannoch and
soon afterwards in Fortingall, by Mr Robert Macdonald, a younger son of the Laird of Dalchosnie,
and uncle of General Sir John Macdonald. Mr
Macdonald was licensed by the Presbytery of Mull
in October, 1802, and ordained by the Presbytery
of Abertarff in May, 1803, whence he removed to
Rannoch. He was presented to Fortingall by John,
Duke of Atholl, and inducted there in September,
1806. He died in February, 1842, in the seventy-
second year of his age, and the thirty-ninth of his
ministry. He prejudiced his position among the
local gentry and among the common people like
wise by marrying his servant maid, who, although
uneducated, made a good wife for him. It was
indeed said that she was a kind of guardian angel
to him as long as she lived, and that after her death
he deteriorated in respect to strict sobriety and
diligent discharge of his ministerial duties. He
took life easy, and was too much inclined to boon
companion sociality, but never went so far as to lay
himself open to Church discipline or censure. That
he was a jolly good fellow nobody could deny, nor
that he had talents and knowledge which would
have given him ministerial influence had he made
the most of them. But he was always far more
liked as a man than he was respected or reverenced
as a minister. He wrote the paper on his parish
given in the "New Statistical Account of Scotland."
I have seen other documents written by him, which
showed that he could state a legal case or draw
up a petition with singular ability. He was
fond of Gaelic poetry, and possessed a great store
of stories.
Mr Macdonald was succeeded by
Mr, afterwards
Dr, Alexander Irvine eldest son of Dr Irvine,
Little Dunkeld. He came to Fortingall from Foss,
where he had been minister for some years, and
was soon after the Disruption taken to Blair-Atholl,
where he spent the remainder of his life. Mr Irvine
was followed by Mr Donald Stewart, from Tobermory. He was a native of Breadalbane, the pious
and worthy son of pious farming people. His wife,
Agnes Shiels, was descended from a brother of the
author of the "Hind Let Loose." It is rather
singular that Mr Macara, Mr Macdonald, and Mr
Stewart should not now have a single representative, and I am not sure that Mr Fergus Ferguson
has any either. Sir Robert, who fell at Quatre
Bras, was Mr Macara's only child, and he died
unmarried. Mr Macdonald and Mr Stewart had
sons and daughters who all died unmarried. The
deposed Mr Robertson is still represented by his
daughters. General Sir Archibald Campbell and
his wife were both of them great-grandchildren
of his.
In 1842 dissent in Fortingall
was confined to a
small number of Baptists who were associated with
the Baptists of Lawers, and whose pastor was worthy
Mr Duncan Cameron, father of the author of the
"Gaelic Names of Plants," and also of Mr Robert
Cameron, a north of England member of Parliament.
Mr Donald Maclellan, cousin of Mr Cameron,
Lawers, another Fortingall man, was for many years
Baptist minister in Glenlyon. During the revival
movement out of which the Baptist communities
arose, Mr Macdonald, the easy-going parish
minister, was so far from coming up to the
popular ideal of ministerial zeal and strictness of
life that it is almost a wonder the sectaries
were so few. Of the many stories told about him
two small harmless ones may be related briefly. A
good many young men of the upper classes who
gathered to a Christmas entertainment at Glenlyon
House were amusing themselves putting the stone
and throwing the hammer when the minister
happened to be passing by. They hailed him, and
he joined them. He was then beyond middle age,
but having been in his youth an athlete, he boasted
of former feats and ran down their performances.
He was handling the hammer while delivering his
criticism, and they challenged him to throw it, and
he did so, but he was out of practice, and the
hammer, having taken a wrong swirl, fell close to
him. At this mishap there was much laughter.
The minister, now on his mettle, asked for another
throw, and sent the hammer several feet beyond
their farthest mark. He then went away, saying to
them as he left "When you go beyond my mark,
send down word to the manse, and I'll come up and
put off my cassock."
For the last period of his
preaching life he had
made a selection from his written sermons, and used
to read them in order, Sunday after Sunday, till he
came to the end of the parcel, and then, turning it
over, began at the beginning again. People with
good memories knew beforehand what would be
next Sunday's sermons, for they were in pairs,
English and Gaelic. Some years before his death
he went for a month or two in the summer to live in
the thatched house belonging to the croft he rented
and farmed along with his glebe, because repairs
were being made on the manse. In this temporary
abode an outbreak of fire took place one night,
which caused more alarm than damage to anything,
except the disarrangement of the minister's sermons.
His New Year sermon was familiarly known to his
congregation. The text was: "Observe the month
of Abib, and keep the Passover unto the Lord thy
God: for in this month of Abib the Lord thy God
brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt by
night." Now there was no month of Abib sermon
on the New Year Sunday after the fore-mentioned
incident. But in the March of that year the Abib
sermon turned up again. The minister, after the
fire, had never troubled himself to re-arrange the
sermons as they were previously, but took them one
by one in the order in which they chanced to fall,
without looking at the text before he went into the
pulpit. When chaffed about preaching a New Year
sermon in March, he good-humouredly replied that
March was the month of Abib, and that the old
Christian year used to begin then.
In the changes brought about
by time, the
Jacobite Episcopal ianism with which Mr Ferguson
had to contend died out utterly. Lively memory of
Mr Macara's evangelical preaching, stern discipline,
and all round ministerial efficiency counteracted Mr
Macdonald's slackness largely, but, I believe, although they liked him as a man, the Fortingall
people must have felt the flouts and gibes of the
Baptists keenly, and during the Ten Years' Conflict
the sneers of their neighbours about their minister,
and the feelings so roused, coloured their after
conduct in the case of the disputed settlement in
which I was subsequently involved. In their short
and far separated periods of service at Fortingall,
the two Irvines, father and son, kept up the Macara
tradition, and the son, although far from being such
a popular preacher as his father, helped to confirm
not a few of the Fortingall people in their determination to stick to the Church of Scotland at the Disruption. Those who seceded were not numerous
enough to form a separate congregation. They put
themselves under Mr Sinclair, the Free Church
minister of Kenmore. They regularly crossed
Drummond Hill to go to church Sunday after Sun-
day, but in time they got a meeting house on
Chesthill's land at Croftgarrow, to which Mr Sinclair
came at stated times to preach. They communicated
at Kenmore until 1857 or a year later, when, having
accession through the split in the parish church
congregation as the result of the disputed settlement
case, they got a church and a minister of their own.
They never made an attempt to set up a Free
Church school. Those who did not secede in 1843
were more happy in their next minister, Mr Donald
Stewart, presented by the Duke of Atholl. Mr
Stewart was an earnest evangelical preacher, of
amiable peace-loving character, who applied himself
assiduously to his pastoral duties, and in the fiercely
hot days after the Disruption gained the respect of
those who did not go to hear him. Candid Free
Churchmen said they only regretted that they had
not themselves more ministers like him, and the
more critical of their party could say nothing worse
of him than that he was a Moderate, and had
attached himself to the wrong side. He died, un-
fortunately, at the end of 1855, when in the fifty-
fifth year of his age. Having, when in Mull, been
induced to become security for a relation who came
to financial grief, he had to bear the burden of the
debt so incurred for the remainder of his days, and
he did not live long enough to pay it all off, although,
notwithstanding his numerous family, that end was
not far off at the time of his premature death. He
kept his trouble to himself, and it was only when he
died that people understood how manfully he bore
his trials. |
